The people’s diva: Renée Fleming is branching out and looking for ways to keep opera relevant

In January, Charlottesville audiences experienced Renée Fleming’s artistry on the big screen at The Paramount Theater’s HD broadcast of The Metropolitan Opera’s live performance of Lehar’s The Merry Widow. On Friday, February 20, Fleming will grace the stage in person, and while opera houses around the country are facing increasingly tough times prompting cutbacks, strikes […]

ARTS Pick: Fat Tuesday

Celebrate Fat Tuesday in style by tapping into those Southern roots. The Jazz Rascals warm up the evening with a set of Dixieland jazz. The nine-piece ragtime group performs traditional numbers by such greats as Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. Jolie Fille takes the late stage for some rowdy Cajun Rock that’ll […]

ARTS Pick: Charlottesville Symphony

Indulge in the food of love with your sweetheart at the Charlottesville Symphony’s tribute to the romance of Shakespeare. Kate Tamarkin conducts a program chock full of starry-eyed, heartwarming works, including Mendelssohn’s “Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Prokofiev’s “Suites No. 1 and 2 from Romeo and Juliet” and the score to Oscar-winning film Shakespeare […]

ARTS Pick: Unlucky in Love

Sing and dance your Valentine’s blues away at the theme night Unlucky in Love: A Night of Outlaw Country with a Side of Garage with four of central Virginia’s rowdiest honky-tonk acts. Drunk Luke & The Broken Bottles bring some raucous country sing-alongs about frolicking, fighting, and fornicating after sets by The Upper Deckers, Paul […]

Action overload: Lack of cohesion deflates Jupiter Ascending

Every Wachowski movie, for better or worse, is a passion project. There is no theme, visual detail, character or line of dialogue to which the sibling duo does not have a deep personal attachment, from the hopeful nihilism of The Matrix to Cloud Atlas’ meditation on reincarnation and the risk and reward of realizing your […]

ARTS Pick: The Saturday Giant

In the vein of Keller Williams and other one-man bands, Philip Cogley, a.k.a. The Saturday Giant, produces three, four, sometimes five separate tracks at a time during live performances using a guitar, a drum machine, keyboards, and a loop machine. Atop all of his instruments, he adds warm vocals that overlap as harmonies above the […]

Warrior pose: Genghis Khan and inner peace at Second Street Gallery

Aspiring yogis and curious connoisseurs of contemporary art, unite! Second Street Gallery is hosting another installment of the monthly Second Saturday Yoga Art Grooves series that launched in the fall of 2014. A collaboration between Opal Yoga and Second Street Gallery, each event in the series is “its own unique happening, a collusion of artist, […]

ARTS Pick: Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island gets an update in a new stage adaptation broadcast from London’s National Theatre. Adapted by Bryony Lavery and directed by Polly Findlay, the well-known tale of money, murder and mutiny uses wit and casting twists to keep the energy on high. The Guardian gave it four stars, and The Observer […]